


Il M'aime, Il M'aime Pas

by minnuet



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Childhood Friends, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 02:04:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8232251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnuet/pseuds/minnuet
Summary: Kyungsoo is seven when he meets the new boy who moves in next door.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Based off the game of plucking daisy petals while alternately saying "He loves me, he loves me not". Unbeta'ed.  
> Disclaimer: Exo does not belong to me.

 

 

**_He loves me._ **

Kyungsoo is seven when he meets the new boy who moves in next door.

He’s sitting in the garden, staring intently at the daisy that he’s plucked from his mother’s flower pot. His classmate, Baekhyun, had told him that flowers were cursed, because his brother had given the girl down the street a handful of them and she had kissed him on the cheek, which had led to Baekhyun simultaneously making grossed-out noises as he had described it. Yet Kyungsoo had found himself studying the flower, wondering if such a thing could be true – when a curious head had popped up over the garden hedge.

“What’s that?” the curious head asks, hair flopping untidily over a pair of keen eyes.

“It’s a flower,” Kyungsoo replies, “it’s supposed to be cursed.”

“Really?” The head disappears, followed by the sound of something being dragged on the ground, only to appear a few moments later as a small unfamiliar boy, perhaps around Kyungsoo’s age, or younger, climbs over the hedge. “Can I see it?”

Kyungsoo shrugs. “Sure,” he says, holding the daisy out towards the boy who’s managed to scramble over the barrier without a scratch. “Don’t blame me if weird stuff happens to you.”

The new boy takes the daisy hesitantly, and looks it over. “It’s just a flower.” He plucks a petal off, and Kyungsoo snatches it back from him.

“Don’t do that!” he yells, and the boy looks at him, eyes wide open in shock. “It--it makes people do funny things!”

“Like what?”

“Gross stuff, like kissing, or—or--- _stuff_!” Kyungsoo tries to attach the petal back onto the flower, but it’s no use. Angrily, Kyungsoo throws the daisy onto the ground, and stomps on it.

“But it’s just a flower,” the boy replies, looking bewildered, and his lip is trembling, like he’s about to cry as he stares at the flattened flower. “You broke it.” Tears begin to well up in his eyes, and Kyungsoo feels something inside his chest tighten, and his own eyes begin to sting from the guilt.

He grabs the nearest thing to him and pushes it at the boy. “Here,” he says, “you can have this.” The boy stares down at the small flowerpot in his hands. “It’s yours.”

A soft smile begins to form on the boy’s face, and he looks up at Kyungsoo. “Really?”

Kyungsoo nods.

The smile grows wider, and the boy ducks his head shyly. “Thank you,” he says, his cheeks turning pink. “They’re really pretty, like you.”

Maybe the daisies were cursed, after all.

 

**_He loves me not._ **

At the age of eight, Kyungsoo learns that he’s not the only person to give Jongin flowers.

Jongin has a best friend from his old neighbourhood, who isn’t Kyungsoo, by the name of Lee Taemin. Taemin’s parents drop him off at Jongin’s place for a week during the school holidays. It’s perfectly alright, in Kyungsoo’s eyes, because with Taemin around, Jongin bugs Kyungsoo a lot less and he has more time to play with his own toys and read his own books.

Except that without Jongin around, it’s a little more lonely than usual and Kyungsoo finds himself dragging a stool over towards the hedge. He climbs onto the stool, and tiptoes to peer over the top to peek into Jongin’s garden where he had heard voices coming from earlier.

He finds the two boys sitting on the grass. He’s about to call out to Jongin, when Taemin carefully drops a flower crown onto Jongin’s head before making kissing noises at him.

With a giggle, Jongin shoves at Taemin and Kyungsoo clambers off the stool, nearly falling down in his haste.

Thankfully, Taemin goes home a week later, and Kyungsoo’s days aren’t so lonely anymore.

 

**_He loves me._ **

Jongin calls Kyungsoo _hyung_ and holds his hand when Kyungsoo hides in his room, tired of all the fighting in his house. His parents call each other names and while none of it is directed to him, it still hurts to hear the words that they hurl across the dining table.

He never says anything when Kyungsoo stops shaking, his tears long dried up, but pulls the blanket over the both of them before they fall asleep.

 

**_He loves me not._ **

The girls in class are pretty, Jongin tells Kyungsoo, when he enters high school and begins to take up dance classes. He describes to Kyungsoo how their hair looks so shiny and their legs do impossible splits and he wonders if he’ll ever be as good as them.

His words are like little knives, digging deeper into Kyungsoo’s heart, but Kyungsoo says nothing as he turns the page on the book he’s no longer paying attention to, that he hasn’t even been paying attention to in the last hour.

 

**_He loves me._ **

Kyungsoo has his first kiss when he’s seventeen, out in the garden when his parents are at work and Jongin is sitting next to him, trying to make sense of his schoolwork. It’s quick and chaste and has Kyungsoo blushing to the roots of his hair, but the look of self-satisfaction on Jongin’s face makes him smack the other boy on the arm before he finds himself being tugged in for a second, longer kiss.

 

**_He loves me not._ **

Jongin doesn’t tell him about the acceptance letter until two days before he’s due to leave for Paris, and when he does, Kyungsoo feels his heart break, torn like the petals of the daisies that he spends the day tearing up angrily in his mother’s garden.

 

**_He loves me._ **

Jongin picks up the pieces of his heart, puts it back together over the months. It’s an email at first, starting off with – “ _Hyung, I saw an owl necklace that I bought in the streets, because it made me think of you_ ” – followed by another, two days later, about his terrible dance teacher whom the students have nicknamed ‘The Bear’, by his dark bushy eyebrows and the way he growls at the students.

Kyungsoo doesn’t reply at first, but by the time the fifth email comes in, attached with a picture of a bouquet of daisies, Kyungsoo finds his cold front melting.

 

**_He loves me not._ **

It’s hard hearing it from someone else, but Kyungsoo congratulates himself for not punching Taemin in the face when he hears that Jongin is dating one of the female instructors in his dance academy. It’s clearly not Taemin’s fault, _Hey, don’t shoot the messenger_ , he tells Kyungsoo, whose fingers are gripping the straps of his messenger bag tightly as he stares stonily at the other boy, but Kyungsoo feels his emotions warring inside him with his sense of logic.

Email after email is ignored, until Jongin tries to call him from Paris, even leaving messages on his voicemail, but Kyungsoo hardens his heart and shuts him out.

His pillow is wet from tears at night, but he pretends not to notice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**_He loves me, too._ **

Jongin standing on his doorstep, Jongin looking worse for wear from not sleeping, Jongin flying back because he had been so worried, so freaked out, so angry, so scared –

“I’m crazy about _you_ ,” Jongin tells him desperately, reaching out for him, his hands wrapping around Kyungsoo’s body before he can step back, and tugging him close, “You, only you, please don’t do this to me again—”

A jealous rival, a hidden agenda, a dance recital that would secure Jongin’s future with the school – it all spills out, as Jongin holds onto Kyungsoo, refusing to let go even as his tears fall onto Kyungsoo’s cheek.

“Say something, hyung,” Jongin whispers, his breath hot against Kyungsoo’s forehead. “Please say you believe me, because I can’t—I can’t do this, I can’t leave and go back knowing you hated me—”

“I don’t,” Kyungsoo tells him, because he’s stunned, he’s feeling stupid for being irrationally jealous, “I could never hate you, Jongin,” he adds, because even during all those nights of crying, he had hated only himself for giving his heart to a boy who had blushed at him and accepted his flowers so many years ago. “I-I love you too much.”

This time, _this_ time, it’s Kyungsoo who reaches out, and pulls Jongin towards him for a kiss, and he hears, before their lips touch, Jongin whispering his own confession—

“ _I love you too_.”

 

_ ~fin~ _

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted at [AFF](http://www.asianfanfics.com/story/view/905935/) and [LJ](http://blueminnuet.livejournal.com/7393.html).


End file.
